Yeah, so, I ended up believing that my academic research was completely useless, but tried to continue with the PhD anyway. Not only was it demoralizing, but my anxiety and ADHD just came pouring out and I hated even thinking about my research. It grew worse and worse. Eventually, my advisor left, I had no funding, and I withdrew with nothing to show for the past 3.5 years except student loans.

Fun times.

(What was the research? Basically taking Heckman's 70s-era selection correction and applying it to nonlinear models. Big fuckin' whoop. My advisor had already written multiple useless papers riffing on the idea anyway. He's probably still doing it to this day.)